Dawdling over my Topre mount keycaps order there, a few other things of theirs caught my eye. These come with damping rings, for a price. I wonder what happens when they are fitted. The caps run low? Are there collisions when you bottom out?

The other thing is their Bluetooth 60% PCB but that’s a whole other topic.

Those are better than the JTK ones, but worse than the Novatouch ones (feeling-wise). Faults: (1) those intended for the larger keys have to be filed in the corners to fit, (2) at least my batch has a very small angle (when mounting keycaps, they are very slightly rotated to the right, if I remember correctly), aaand (3) the stems are a little too thin, i.e. the keycaps are a little bit loose - again, that happened on my batch, I don't know if all are like this. Also they are not fit for silencing rings (no internal notch), and probably the legs should be shortened too in that case. That doesn't mean one can't use the KBDFans very-thin-silencing-rings, but *some* tactility is lost, in my experience. There are some who say that they don't feel any tactility loss, however.

That’s the detail I want! I’ve never even tried NovaTouch sliders in my Realforce, let alone vital #1 workhorse HHKB Type-S. So what’s the story with stabs? The NovaTouch handles MX mount stabilisation like this:

It’s been a long, long time since I was last inside a Topre. How do aftermarket MX mods work there? No stabilisation besides the central slider itself? How does that feel on a spacebar?

The stabilisers on the Shift, Enter etc. work pretty well; as for the spacebar ... AFAIK most people let the spacebar alone, since it it's a 6u one harder to find in its MX-compatible format; it became easier nowadays to just buy aftermarket 6u Topre spacebars (or spacebar kits, wink wink nudge nudge) which have the advantage over the originals of also being made from PBT.

True. I like Matteo’s PBT spacebars, and I bet these are simply clones. But how well do they lie, height wise, when mixed with Cherry or DSA or SA caps? Those are the 3 MX profiles I have to play with, very much in reverse order! It’d be a cliff…

Not all is lost, IF you have 6u MX-compatible spacebars .. there was a thread on GeekHack about somebody replacing the spacebar from a HHKB I think, by placing (somehow! that's the trick) Costar stabilizers instead of the Topre spacebar stabilizer housings. Sure, you can always take the spacebar stabs from a Novatouch, but this means you just sacrificed it, or you moved the problem on the Novatouch ..

Ah yes! Here it is:

Relevant text:

Q: Did you replace (move) the SA Spacebar's stem or is there any other wizardy to make this possible? A: Nope, although I did glue in the costar stabilizers I had - they weren't tight.

(This thread, called "Topre SA keycaps other than HiPro?", although it won't load for me right now, had to use google's cache)

Pics from that same thread (to drool over):

Spoiler:

P.S. Sorry for somewhat hijacking the thread (temporarily)! All in the name of Topre-to-MX-conversion keyboard science!

No worries. I am thinking about another title for the topic. I'm a bit busy finishing the introduction of my thesis, which is due ASAP. Hopefully I'll find some time to look into this more, and maybe take some more measurements to confirm the slider differences (and housing too, perhaps).

the_marsbar wrote:I'm sorry for the late update. I was thinking about how to present my findings (in particular, making a drawing that would explain what I measured). I took measurements of sliders from a HHKB Pro 2 (black), HHKB Type-S, CM Novatouch, and a Realforce 104 (purple/silent sliders).

Here's a figure showing the slider and where I measured (E points to where there's a notch in the silenced sliders):

Here are the actual measurements (I measured the thickness of the silencing rings on the HHKB Type-S and Realforce 104 to be 0.4 mm):

The measurements should of course be taken with a grain of salt (the numbers in the table represent single measurements of one slider from each of the keyboard). I might do some more measurements at some point, if I manage to get hold of a better set of vernier calipers (I borrowed my dad's electronic one, probably a cheap unrealiable one). If anyone has suggestions on anything that could be improved, I'm happy to hear them.

I'll add the 5th slider type measurements (also to be taken with a grain of salt):